“I still love poker but I have nothing to play”: Phil Galfond’s Revelations

Why Phil Stopped Playing Poker Regularly By 2024

As of October 18^th, 2024 Phil Galfond almost completely stopped playing cash games but occasionally takes shots in tournaments. This change for a skilful poker professional, who is very passionate about the game and during his 20 years of career had only one losing year, can seem a little strange. But the basis of this decision doesn’t have a mystery component at all — as Phill explained, he just can’t find suitable games for himself:

“I kind of have nothing to play. I don’t really play tournaments, tournaments are not my thing. I play cash games and cash games have all gone private. So, the only thing if I wanted to play high stakes now in a public game — it’s basically just tournaments, they’re my only option.

There are some games where they don’t really care who they play with and they will invite you but they haven’t called me. Usually what happens is there’s a host who runs a game and they either make money from the game like rake or they make money playing in the game. Or they maybe don’t play in the game but they back a couple people in the game and they make money that way.

So, they don’t want good players in, unless they’re going to have a good player that they potentially have a piece of. So, they try to sometimes get pros in but usually it’s just because they’re friends with people in the game and they like their presence there. But not too many of them usually.”

His situation is very interesting when you know that Phil prefers to play online for a few personal and very understandable reasons:

1. He is introverted, so being at a live poker table for 12 hours with the social element gets him burnt out.
2. He deeply loves the problem solving aspect of the game, and while online poker gives him time and space to get into thinking through each hand flow, a lot of elements of live game distract and interrupt him too much.

Phil considering the need of totally control himself and be as unreadable as possible is one of the main inconveniences of live poker games for himself:

“It’s funny like after a day of poker live my body hurts. […] I have to think about my posture, what my face looks like, am I moving correctly, “I have to talk to this person now” — a lot of things distract from just the purity of the game.”

Old-time Friendship Between Phil Galfond And Tom Dwan

While Phil and Tom look from outside perspective as people, who don’t have even one common thing, in reality they were not just friends but best friends a long time ago. That’s how Phil speaks about their friendship:

“Early on he was one of my best friends in poker. He taught me a lot especially when I moved from No Limit Hold’em to PLO.

He had been playing it for a few years, I didn’t know anything. He’s a very generous person. I just remember, I had known him for like six months because we ran in the same circle of poker friends but I didn’t really know him that well, and he was telling me I should get into PLO. I was like: “Well, you know, I don’t know the first thing about it”. And he’s like:” Oh, just watch me play”. And then I sat down next to him as he played for six hours. And that’s something that someone of that stature to just give that away without thinking about it is really kind.”

Even if this friendship faded over time, Phil continues to see Tom as a good guy.

He remains faithful even after his friend was accused of non-payment of debt and this story became one of poker dramas on X (ex-Twitter):

“You hear things when you’re part of the poker circles and there people have different side of the story. There were a few different things but I think two people involved in the drama were Peter Jetten and Haralabos Voulgaris — I’m friends with both of them too. So, I was sad to see it.

Tom and I don’t hang out as much as we used to but I got to know him so well back then. And I’m confident that he’s a good person who means well. And I think sometimes, what it sounded like happened, he can be aloof and so he can lose track of things. He can also think that some things are going to come together. So, I think that it’s accidental.

It’s still like if we’re to take, let’s say, Peter’s story at face value — I have no reason to distrust him — it’s still not fair to Peter but I don’t think Tom does those things intentionally.”

Why Live Poker Pros Are Often Bad In Online Poker

There is an opinion that poker players, who turn from live poker to online and vice versa, in most cases find themselves losing money in an unwonted way to play.

Phil doesn’t think so definitely, thanks to his experience and well understanding of poker players’ mindset:

“A lot of people say: “I’m good live and then I go online and I lose” or they either say: “I’m bad online” or “because the games are rigged” or something like that.

The reality is online games are much tougher at the equivalent stakes. The rule of thumb that I use is that the online games are like the equivalent of 10 times higher the stakes live. So, if you’re playing 1/2 online — that would be like 10/20 live.

So, what happens is people play 5/10 live, they go into 5/10 online — and just get massacred because 5/10 online is like 50/100 live.”

To understand why he uses the 10x limits rule, Phil suggests to think about it from perspective of the player and their earn rate, using himself as an example:

“When I play live, I play maybe 30 hands an hour. And when I play online, depending on what I’m playing, then I’m probably around 500 hands an hour.

So, if I had the same win rate playing 30 hands an hour versus 500 hands an hour — I’m making almost 20 times as much playing online.

That is kind of “why”, because if the games were the same quality — everybody would go online. 

Moreover, a lot of people think that online is rigged or everybody is cheating or something like: “When I don’t see the person — I can’t figure it out”. But I think it’s just no — they hop into the same stakes online and it’s much tougher, that’s all”.